My favorites in order were Lines, Clooney, Boris’ Complete Book Of Rules, and The Prestidigitator. Lots of people were very impressed by 1/100 of a second but I thought it pushed emotional buttons in a rather clumsy fashion. Feeling Lonely was a very obvious reworking of Rear Window and I Want To Be A Pilot was like the world’s most tedious Christian Children’s Fund commercial. The others were so-so.

Lines could be, and should be, made into a series for high-school kids. You could do an awful lot with the main character they created and I think it would be massively popular. Unfortunately it has not hit YouTube yet.

“If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticize it.” - Pierre Gallois

How about …“And even if you put good numbers into Excel, tomfoolery may still come out.”

Even my old slide rule, with its 3-sig limited accuracy, delivers 65,5xx… a much smaller error, and easy enough to resolve to the full number with a couple more steps.

Updates:

In the comments Ed posted a very good link below to Joel On Software Explaining the Excel Bug – especially interesting because Joel worked on early versions of Excel.

BBC Reports that the Afghan Taleban ‘to honour polio drive’. Well isn’t that good of them. They’re the ones who in the past have been spreading the lie that the polio vaccine made Muslims sterile, or caused AIDS or tuberculosis. We should be completely done with polio by now. But the Taleban are directly responsible for the fact that Afghanistan is one of only a few places on Earth where polio has not been wiped out.

Over the last several months, I’ve been using a couple different flavors of Linux on my IBM/Lenovo X40 laptop, with the idea of writing a review of desktop Linux the way I did for the Apple laptop that I borrowed. Of course, since I didn’t have to give Linux back in a month, I used it for a greater length of time.

As with the Apple, I didn’t try to become a super-geek in the OS being tested. The parameters of the test were a knowledgeable Windows user stranded with the unfamiliar OS, sink or swim.

Linux worked pretty well, though there were a couple extremely annoying glitches. In the final analysis I just preferred Windows XP more, and Windows is the native home for two of my six favorite applications. (Yes, I know it is possible to tuck then into Wine but then I’m not really testing the Linux apps, am I?)

Why do instruments like the Hubble and Arecibo, which are great bargains, have to go begging for funds, while flashy wasteful projects like the International Space Station go on hemorrhaging our tax dollars and returning nothing? (Just for comparison, you could run Arecibo for 1,600 years for what it will cost to finish the scientifically useless International Space Station.) One reason could be that in a jaw-dropping 1994 act of bean-counting foolishness, the Republican-controlled congress closed the Office of Technology Assessment, the non-partisan scientific auditing arm of our legislative branch. This is like not replacing the headlights on your car to save lunch money.

There’s a proposal and a petition to bring back the OTA. There’s certainly never been a better time to spend a little bit of dough to make sure we’re getting the biggest bang for our science buck. Check out the link, write your congressman, sign the petition, and help unlobotomize Congress.

I’ve been watching the Jena Six case. You know – in Jena, La, where some white teens thought it would be hilarious to hang three nooses on a tree where some black teens had sat down, and a year of increasing tension followed with fights and arson and white kids being charged with mopery and black kids being charged with felonies. And an internet-driven protest brought reportedly 20,000 protesters to the little town of 2,000 souls. (Where did they all go to the bathroom?)

Events like this have a way of bringing out the stupid in everyone. What’s the dumbest statement to come out of the whole sorry affair?

We’ve made progress, yes. But I think our problem today is classism as an echo of racism. Some aspects of black culture appear to be poisoned by past oppressions and ill-conceived remedies. Some aspects of white culture seem to be in deep denial. (Overlooking the absurd idea that either blacks or whites have a monolithic culture.) Truly the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons and the son’s sons, and down through the generations. It does not help that so many “leaders” are preening opportunists trying to get in front of the camera any way they can.

I’ve read a lot of chatter online that attempted murder was the right charge. That seems unlikely; if six athletic kids don’t kill one unconscious guy on the ground, and he ends up with only minor injuries, they weren’t trying to kill him.. But it is still assault and last I checked, that is a crime.

25 September – our favorite Louisiana blogger has this update: a Michigan congressman is trying to get one of the 6 released, and Rev. Sharpton says the “next step is nonviolent civil disobedience”. I predict there will be more violence. Someone in this country IS keeping racism alive and well, and this cartoon sums it up pretty well